[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) - The web as a database
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Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) - The web as a database
Hey HN! We're Will and Jeff from Exa (https://exa.ai). We recently
launched Exa Websets, an embeddings-powered search engine designed
to return exactly what you're asking for. You can get precise
results for complex queries like "all startups working on open-
source developer tools based in SF, founded 2021-2025". Demo here -
https://youtu.be/Unt8hJmCxd4 We started working on Exa because we
were frustrated that while LLM state-of-the-art is advancing every
week, Google has gotten worse over time. The Internet used to feel
like a magical information portal, but it doesn't feel that way
anymore when you're constantly being pushed towards SEO-optimized
clickbait. Websets is a step in the opposite direction. For every
search, we perform dozens of embedding searches over Exa's vector
database of the web to find good search candidates, then we run
agentic workflows on each result to verify they match exactly what
you asked for. Websets results are good for two reasons. First, we
train custom embedding models for our main search algorithm,
instead of typical keyword matching search algorithms. Our
embeddings models are trained specifically to return exactly the
type of entity you ask for. In practice, that means if you search
"startups working in nanotech", keyword-based search engines return
listicles about nanotech startups, because these listicles match
the keywords in the query. In contrast, our embedding models return
actual startup homepages, because these startup homepages match the
meaning of the query. The second is that LLMs provide the last-
mile intelligence needed to verify every result. Each result and
piece of data is backed with supporting references that we used to
validate that the result is actually a match for your search
criteria. That's why Websets can take minutes or even hours to run,
depending on your query and how many results you ask for. For
valuable search queries, we think this is worth it. Also notably,
Websets are tables, not lists. You can add "enrichment" columns to
find more information about each result, like "# of employees" or
"does author have blog?", and the cells asynchronously load in.
This table format hopefully makes the web feel more like a
database. A few examples of searches that work with Websets: -
"Math blogs created by teachers from outside the US":
https://websets.exa.ai/cma1oz9xf007sis0ipzxgbamn - "research paper
about ways to avoid the O(n^2) attention problem in transformers,
where one of the first author's first name starts with "A","B",
"S", or "T", and it was written between 2018 and 2022":
https://websets.exa.ai/cm7dpml8c001ylnymum4sp11h - "US based
healthcare companies, with over 100 employees and a technical
founder": https://websets.exa.ai/cm6lc0dlk004ilecmzej76qx2 - "all
software engineers in the Bay Area, with experience in startups,
who know Rust and have published technical content before":
https://youtu.be/knjrlm1aibQ You can try it at
https://websets.exa.ai/ and API docs are at
https://docs.exa.ai/websets. We'd love to hear your feedback!
Author : willbryk
Score : 220 points
Date : 2025-05-06 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
| mh- wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Can it perform searches that rely on the rendered (JS-executed)
| state of the website? If so, does it have access to the DOM?
|
| Example use case: "The 10 most trafficked e-commerce sites that
| load Adobe Analytics tag(s)."
| willbryk wrote:
| We render JS and then parse pages, but that process will
| definitely parse out Adobe Analytics tags unfortunately.
|
| Noting this though!
| mbeavitt wrote:
| This is super cool. You provide examples of "searches that work"
| - can you give an idea of the limitations here? What kind of
| searches won't work?
| willbryk wrote:
| We're a startup, so most of our resources go towards use cases
| that our users care most about. So the search should work best
| for - people, companies, papers, high quality written content
| (e.g., blogs, news). It should work well at more than just
| those (try Github repo search, it's quite good :D), but those
| are the best supported.
|
| Types of searches Websets doesn't currently do well at: -
| products (e.g., ecommerce sites) - Content that requires
| authentication/permissions to access - non-English content
|
| Some of the above are on our roadmap, and let us know if
| there's some type of data you'd like us to support!
| colkassad wrote:
| Geospatial data would be great. This stuff is notoriously
| annoying to search for. For example:
|
| "Give me a list of free imagery service endpoints I can use
| in a maplibre style sheet. Include information such as name,
| description, service endpoint, service type, extent
| (global/regional)."
| willbryk wrote:
| This might be possible if you specify geospatial location
| as an enriched column. The visualization of it as a map
| though is not supported in the UI, but can be built by
| giving an LLM access to the Websets API
| dbuxton wrote:
| Hey! Congrats on the launch. I just signed up for a trial account
| and I'm pretty impressed with the search API (haven't used
| websets yet but looks cool).
|
| Our experimental use case is enabling quick and dirty integration
| of web-based docs into an employee service agentic chatbot - lots
| of the questions are around "how do I max out my 401k", which
| connects to internal information, but some are more like "how do
| I link a calendar to calendly".
|
| The one thing I'd love to have in the search product is a cruft
| cleaner for the results of web queries. Where you have cached the
| data presumably this wouldn't add much overhead. Reduces what you
| have to feed to the LLM downstream and might improve the
| embeddings performance.
| willbryk wrote:
| By cruft cleaner, do you mean cleaning the HTML well? Right
| now, we do 2 things to help with that, a pretty robust parsing
| stack as well as a "summaries" feature that returns an LLM-
| generated query-biased text output for every webpage returned.
|
| If something else though, curious.
| ByteAtATime wrote:
| This is really cool! Just a small nitpick: on a low-powered
| device, the hero globe is really laggy (it's fine if I scroll
| past it, though).
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| And it doesn't work at all if you have WebGL disabled, just
| shows "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred
| (see the browser console for more information)."
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Even with it working I initially thought it was trying to
| convey some meaning, but it's just a bunch of logos not really
| doing anything.
| willbryk wrote:
| Thanks for letting us know - made a Linear ticket
| mkrishnan wrote:
| Congratulations! great idea,
|
| some issues I noticed, I searched "lucid air touring models
| available for sale Under 20,000 miles" and tried to add column
| "sale price", but did get the price details, same for other cars
| as well
| willbryk wrote:
| Hm! I'll try this out. Sometimes info like price are hard to
| parse out because the data may be on ecommerce-style websites
| that have many crawling protections
| alecdewitz wrote:
| Congrats guys!
| willbryk wrote:
| ty!
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > We'd love to hear your feedback!
|
| I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and
| all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's
| been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo (please don't try
| to hide that it's so slow, especially since you seem to imply to
| be a Google competitor ("Google has gotten worse over time"),
| while your product is incomparably slower than Google; it's more
| like deep research).
| dang wrote:
| Edit: the parent has edited their comment several times, which
| is fine since I invited them to, but the edits obscure the
| original comment, which was "I gave it a try and my first
| search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are
| "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can
| see why you cut your demo.".
|
| ---
|
| > _I can see why you cut your demo._
|
| Can you please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines request
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? Your
| comment would be just fine without that bit.
|
| Everyone is familiar with how often software launches run into
| glitches, and there's no need to be uncharitable.
|
| (If you didn't mean it as a swipe and I just misread you, feel
| free to edit your comment and I'll delete this when I'm back
| online.)
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| What is a swipe?
| dang wrote:
| A bit of gratuitous nastiness.
|
| Edit: adding "no offense" doesn't change this.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Is it better now?
| dang wrote:
| It's marginally better because it explains what you mean,
| and that at least eliminates other nasty interpretations.
|
| However, I don't think it's fair for you to assume
| they're "trying to hide that it's so slow". There's no
| need to impute bad motives to people, and you don't have
| nearly enough information to justify such a claim.
|
| What's wrong with simply reporting the problem that
| you're experiencing with the software? That would make
| your comment helpful, with no trace of a putdown.
| 85392_school wrote:
| > while your product is incomparably slower than Google
|
| Exa was originally just a search engine. They try to hide it
| these days to promote Websets, but you can still use it at
| https://exa.ai/search.
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| We hid it because the UI wasn't maintained.
|
| I joined recently, and live-streamed myself designing and
| shipping the new search frontend in 5h32m
|
| https://x.com/LiamHinzman/status/1911244983291514941
|
| Added a link to it on our homepage, thanks for pointing that
| out!
| 85392_school wrote:
| Oh, good to hear. I've been waiting for its return.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
| willbryk wrote:
| Thanks!
| frankramos wrote:
| The Exa LinkedIn webset is something very innovative. Many
| current providers make it difficult if not against "Terms of
| Service" to build a product using their data. The irony is that
| they simply scraped LinkedIn.
| artembugara wrote:
| Will, Jeff, I am a BIG Exa fan. Congrats on finally doing your HN
| Launch.
|
| I think NewsCatcher (my YC startup) and Exa aren't direct
| competitors but we definitely share the same insight -- SERP is
| not the right way to let LLM interact with web. Because it's
| literally optimized for humans who can open 10 pages at most.
|
| What we found is that LLMs can sift through 10k+ web pages if you
| pre-extract all the signals out of it.
|
| But we took a bit of a different angle. Even though we have over
| 1.5 billion of news stories only in our index we don't have a
| solution to sift through as your Websets do (saw your impressive
| GPU cluster :))
|
| So what we do instead is we do bespoke pipelines for our
| customers (who are mostly large enterprise/F1000). So we fine-
| tune LLMs on specific information extraction with very high
| accuracy.
|
| Our insight: for many enterprises the solution should be either a
| perfect fit or nothing. And that's where they're ok to pay
| 10-100x for the last mile effort.
|
| P.S. Will, loved your comment on a podcast where you said Exa can
| be used to find a dating partner.
| willbryk wrote:
| Thanks Artem! That makes sense to specialize for the biggest
| customers. Yes, a lot of problems in the world would be
| improved by better search, including dating.
| srameshc wrote:
| So the crawlers are feeding to database and also something is
| classifying the data stream and organizing the data and
| everything is open as a very large dataset. This is an
| interesting concept.
| cobertos wrote:
| What your describe is the same concept as what https://hash.ai
| purports to be
| willbryk wrote:
| Yup exactly! And we expose this as a regular search API as well
| as in the Websets product.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I wish you all the best, exa is pretty much Perplexity done
| right. So nice!
| lgiordano_notte wrote:
| Really cool direction. The embedding-first + agentic verification
| pipeline resonates, similar pattern worked well for us in the web
| interaction space.
| thm wrote:
| Now that you've got some money in the bank, you should get a
| license for the serif on your website (font-family:
| RecklessTrial-Regular;).
| twostorytower wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Given you were in YC S21, when AI was
| much more under the radar, did you recently pivot? I'm guessing
| it wasn't a 4 year road to launch.
| willbryk wrote:
| Not a pivot - Websets is just a new product!
|
| Mission of Exa has always been to build much better web search.
| The evolution has been:
|
| - 2022: Consumer-facing embeddings search (back when we were
| known as Metaphor)
|
| - 2023: Web search for AIs - once the AI ecosystem heated up,
| we made a business out of web search + crawling API. This is
| still our primary business.
|
| - Now: Websets, a useful product built on top of our search
| tech
|
| If you're curious, our company right now is fully devoted to:
|
| 1. Dramatically improving Websets quality
|
| 2. Building the best general search engine in the world
| saadatq wrote:
| This looks really great.
|
| And also how "internal" business intelligence/operations tools
| should work. search first to find relevant artifacts - "top 10
| customers in AMEA", followed by agentic verification and
| enrichment.
|
| Congrats on the launch!
| willbryk wrote:
| Thanks! Let us know how you find it :)
| tcbtcb wrote:
| This is so cool! What are the top use cases you're seeing rn? The
| semantic heavy search is something most sourcing platforms fail
| consistently on, especially around people search
| esafak wrote:
| I suggest caching and enabling the sharing of results. I am not
| signed in so I don't know if that is feature I am missing.
|
| I searched for "alternatives to jq with a functional API" and one
| of the criteria it came up with was "Provides technical details
| or comparisons relevant to the alternatives" but the table only
| listed the repo's url and description. And the description was
| truncated with ellipses with no way for me to resize the columns.
| Also, it missed the opportunity to tell me that some shells can
| replicate jq's functionality. Finally, it would have to be faster
| to be a daily driver. At this speed, it is something I would
| reserve for backup, for when the workhorse fails. Which means I
| would not want to pay $49/month.
|
| Hope that helps. Interesting idea.
| willbryk wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| Yeah we'd love to make the product as accessible and cheap as
| possible, but as of state of AI costs of 2025, it's a very
| expensive product to run and so we have it login gated. If
| you're willing to log in though, you'll find a lot of the
| features that you're mentioning :)
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| Without signing in you're only able to view the preview table,
| which is just Exa's regular search.
|
| If you sign in each result will be graded by an LLM, supporting
| references will be found, you can get agents to add arbitrary
| data to each result, and the table UI is much better.
|
| Understand if you don't want to sign up, I'd just look at the
| examples linked in the OP in that case
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think it might be a good idea to give some kind of indication
| that work is being done in the background (or perhaps mine
| stalled out?).
|
| The initial search/experience is good but then I got dumped here
| [0] and it's not clear to me if things are still happening or if
| it broke (it's been at least 5 min with no UI updates.
|
| I can't see the full results yet but this is very interesting and
| a task I ask OpenAI's Deep Research to attempt periodically. It
| makes a good show of doing the work but the results are not great
| IMHO (for asking it generate lists/tables of data like this). I
| can see this tool being incredibly useful for lead generation
| (how I am testing it out).
|
| [0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/dySqK1mb
| xp84 wrote:
| This is super cool! It took a while, but did a great job of
| evaluating the results, and the airtable-like results UI feels
| great.
|
| Congrats on your launch. With the natural way this lends itself
| to comparison shopping this is an amazing tool for people trying
| to find "the best X for me" whether that's a TV, a school, etc.
| So much content that you find on Google when trying to answer
| that type of query, is designed to trick, bamboozle, and to hide
| the facts that you might use to answer this question (but most of
| all to get you to click affiliate links).
| willbryk wrote:
| Thanks for the support - we're getting hug of death though so
| please bear with us while we scale up!
| jppope wrote:
| I really love the concept here. Lots of utility. Going to play
| around with it tonight and see if it can work for some usecases.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Not to be confused with exa: https://github.com/ogham/exa
| oofbaroomf wrote:
| How big do you think your index is compared to Google?
| philipkglass wrote:
| A smaller index could actually be a benefit if it's missing all
| the "mailing list archives rehosted with more ads" sites that
| pollute my Google search results in recent years.
| androng wrote:
| the homepage has an error in my Google Chrome and my Google
| Chrome incognito but not in my Safari
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ayWyf6ni_kofWrw9lowXjAX_AiI...
| justanotheratom wrote:
| can websets enrich a column with images?
| willbryk wrote:
| There aren't currently any vision LLMs involved. But if you
| asked for image links, it'd probably find you something!
| Mockapapella wrote:
| Honestly I thought you guys had launched already (and didn't know
| you were a part of YC), been aware of you guys for years now it
| seems. Congrats on the launch! Hope the twitter issues aren't
| causing you guys too many problems.
|
| Normally I'd send this as a DM or email, but I think it could be
| useful for others to learn about how to use your service/the
| limitations of it. A couple weeks ago I made a search for:
| In early 2023, Andrej Karpathy said something like "large
| training runs are a good test of the overall health of the
| network." Something something resilience as well I think. I need
| you to find it.
|
| Unfortunately it wasn't able to find it, but it was either in a
| tweet or a really long presentation, neither of which are good
| targets for search. It was around the same time that this
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3b-JASoPi0) video was posted,
| like within a couple weeks before or after. How could I have
| improved my query? Does exa work over videos?
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| I think I found it! Unfortunately we do not include tweets in
| our search index
|
| > TLDR LLM training runs are significant stress-tests of an
| overall fault tolerance of a large computing system acting as a
| biological entity.
|
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/1765424847705047247
| mfrye0 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| How do you dedupe entities, like companies and people? I've
| noticed ChatGPT tends to provide "great" results when asking
| about different entities, but in reality it just groups similar
| sounding entities together in its answer.
|
| For example, I asked ChatGPT about a well known startup. It gave
| me a confident answer about how much they raised, their current
| status, etc. When looking at the 3 sources they cited though, it
| was actually 3 different companies that all had similar sounding
| names that it just grouped together to form its answer.
|
| Basically, how do I trust the output of your system?
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| We find supporting references when evaluating the search
| criteria / enrichments of each result, and you can view these
| citations
|
| https://imgur.com/dsGK5dS
| mfrye0 wrote:
| Right, I saw that. ChatGPT does the same.
|
| My question is how you can confirm the entity you're
| referencing in each source is actually the entity you're
| looking for?
|
| An example I ran into recently is Vast
| (https://www.vastspace.com/). There are a number of other
| notable startups named Vast (https://vast.ai/,
| https://www.vastdata.com/).
|
| I understand Clay, which your Websets product is clearly
| inspired by, does a fair amount of matching based on domain
| name or LinkedIn url.
|
| If Websets is doing fuzzy or naive matching, that's okay. I'm
| just trying to understand the limitations and potential uses
| cases of your current system.
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| Deduplication is mainly driven by LLMs with search results
| as context. Our entity resolution works well because Exa's
| main business is crawling and indexing the web at scale,
| and we can control how we search across that within
| Websets.
|
| As far as I know ChatGPT's search is primarily a wrapper
| around another company's search engine, which is why it
| often feels like it's just summarizing a page of search
| results and sometimes hallucinates badly.
| mfrye0 wrote:
| Thanks for the info. That makes sense.
|
| Looking forward to trying out the product more when I
| have a moment.
| jackienotchan wrote:
| AI crawlers have lead to a big surge in scraping/crawling
| activity on the web, and many don't use proper user agents and
| don't stick to any scraping best practices that the industry has
| developed over the past two decades (robots.txt, rate limits).
| This comes with negative side effects for website owners (costs,
| downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported on HN (and experienced
| myself).
|
| Do you have any built-in features that address these issues?
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| I work in the adtech ad verification space and this is very
| true. the surge in content scraping has made things very very
| hard in some instances. I can't really fault the website owners
| either.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| I think you guys nailed the "selling shovels during a gold rush"
| as the biggest issue with LLMs currently is their
| reliability/hallucinations, not their capabilities. If I can use
| websets to back up LLM responses through your API, that's super
| useful.
|
| Since you were part of YC 21, could you share a bit about your
| pivots/product iterations you went through over the last 4 years?
| willbryk wrote:
| Mission of Exa has always been to build much better web search.
| The evolution has been:
|
| - 2022: Consumer-facing embeddings search (back when we were
| known as Metaphor)
|
| - 2023: Web search for AIs - once the AI ecosystem heated up,
| we made a business out of web search + crawling API. This is
| still our primary business.
|
| - Now: Websets, a useful product built on top of our search
| tech
|
| If you're curious, our company right now is fully devoted to:
|
| 1. Dramatically improving Websets quality
|
| 2. Building the best general search engine in the world
| gavinward wrote:
| It must be heartening for a startup trying to build the best
| general search engine in the world to know that Google has
| absolutely no interest in competing with you.
| willbryk wrote:
| Because Google makes money from ads, they're not actually
| optimized to build the best general search engine in the
| world, they're optimized to build the search engine that
| makes the most from ads, which is correlated with being a
| good search engine but not perfectly aligned. Our business
| model (paying directly for the search) incentivizes us to
| try to return the highest quality results, without any bias
| toward making money from ads. It also enables us to do
| things like pour a ton of compute/resources into a query to
| get the best possible results we can find, because someone
| would pay us a lot for that, and that's hard to do under an
| ads-based model.
| tibbar wrote:
| Wow, this is such an exciting product to me, a great application
| of modern tools. I'm using it to search for people who have very
| specific backgrounds that I would be interested to talk to. Thank
| you for building this.
| xena wrote:
| Do you respect robots.txt? How can I block your crawlers?
| skylerwiernik wrote:
| Do you find this to be worse than googlebot somehow?
| theamk wrote:
| Did my favorite search query, and the result were pretty bad, as
| expected:
|
| "robotics servo motors with two-directional control for under
| $100"
|
| 1. https://mjbots.com/ - their motor are $1369. FAIL.
|
| 2. https://www.pololu.com/ - this is huge store, but they do have
| some motors like that. Pass, but wish it linked to specific page
| and not top top-level one.
|
| 3. dh-robotics.com - no prices, but some products on open market
| are few K$. Likely fail as well.
|
| 4. https://www.robotarticulation.com/ - The product is not for
| sale (early beta), and it looks likely much more than $1K. FAIL.
|
| 5. https://www.lynxmotion.com/ - another huge store, most two-
| directional motors are expensive but there are some under $100...
| Pass, but wish it linked to specific page and not top top-level
| one.
| 85392_school wrote:
| It sounds like they have yet to focus on products yet. Loosely
| quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43907634:
|
| > So the search should work best for people, companies, papers,
| high quality written content.
|
| > Types of searches Websets doesn't currently do well at:
| products, content that requires authentication/permissions to
| access, and non-English content
| gertlex wrote:
| Curious: what is an example of a robotics servo motor with one-
| directional control?
|
| My experience around such started with pwm hobby servos,
| includes dynamixels, and I've worked with larger stuff using
| harmonic drive gearboxes. Can't recall encountering a "servo"
| that is one-directional.
| byearthithatius wrote:
| I was so excited for this, but sadly it doesn't work at all, not
| even UI feedback for the error:(
|
| The UI showed literally no change. So I checked and the console
| shows:
|
| ``` Try: 14 Not Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 15 Not
| Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 16 Not Found
| 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 17 Not Found
| 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 18 Not Found
| 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 19 Not Found
| 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 20 Not Found
| 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Gave up after 10 seconds.
| 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 filteredSuggestions Array(3) [
| {...}, {...}, {...} ] 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 ```
|
| Also your table doesn't fit in the viewport so I can't see the
| results.
|
| Firefox Ubuntu.
| pilingual wrote:
| When OpenAI was rumored to acquire Windsurf last week I went to
| their site and switched languages. When I tried to switch back
| it got into a weird state and didn't display the original
| language. Not sure what to think of that other than vibe coding
| may need a little more oversight. (Who is working on AI QA?
| Winning pickaxe and shovel business right there.)
| tibbar wrote:
| I also thought the UX had silently died on me, but over the
| course of a few hours, results slowly rolled in. And they were
| pretty good, for what it's worth! It's clear they have far more
| demand than supply, at least than can be reasonably offered for
| free.
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| We were down for a bit, back up now! Lmk how the search quality
| turns out for you
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I searched for 'data providers that start with the letter R that
| sell job postings data', and it's been 15 minutes and it barely
| verified the first row.
|
| But if it filtered it first to "start with the letter R", it
| would only have to look at perhaps 5% of the results it's trying
| to verify!
|
| So it's doing needless verification of results that will be
| thrown out by another filter that should've been applied first!
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| We were down for a bit! Ran your search, got 8 matches after
| analyzing 100 results. Took 40 seconds for the first match, and
| another 80 seconds for the other matches.
|
| We use an agentic search planner that adapts its search
| strategy as matches are found, but it could be smarter with
| substrings.
|
| https://websets.exa.ai/cmad36arq009fl30i4dvkc7wn
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Did you guys change the pricing of Exa?
|
| When I checked this a year or so ago, I might have gotten the
| impression that it was cheaper. Now, it costs the same as what
| Perplexity charges for search-grounded queries, which is the same
| as Google charges for Gemini queries with search.
|
| So basically, one player sets a price, and everyone is anchored
| on that as the pricing for the entire category? I'm just
| genuinely interested in why every offering in this space is
| priced like this.
|
| It seems a bit misaligned with how pure LLM queries are priced.
|
| I have a product that would benefit from search grounding, but
| this pricing wouldn't work with my volume of queries.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| What product of yours would benefit, if I dont mind asking?
| liam-hinzman wrote:
| We charge $5 per 1000 requests with our search and answer
| endpoints.
|
| Perplexity charges the same on their lowest tier model, and
| three times as much for their more expensive models.
|
| Gemini charges $35 per 1000 requests.
|
| https://exa.ai/pricing
|
| https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/pricing
|
| https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing
| foobahhhhh wrote:
| Very nice! Like a Databricks for Google, or perhaps think of it
| as Google backend as a service (at least their AI like backend
| not the main search)
|
| It disrupts anyone who merely does one thing this does. E.g.
| contact building app can be done by this. I imagine many
| "wrapper" apps can be built on this.
|
| I am serious though. It felt like using databricks a little bit,
| obviously without all the functionality but that will come.
|
| I'm bullish! Modulo competition. Someone who does this makes
| their billion.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Nice! This feels like Clay(.com) interface (sales people love it)
| but for every piece of data that needs adjacent information.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| This is a nice alternative for my Gemini Deep Research use case.
|
| Most of the time I want to find some vendors / companies and Deep
| Research does that but also responds with a wall of unnecessary
| text where I just want the table
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